Double Shot Consulting - Blog

Social media & accountability at the BBC

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:54:35 -0800

The BBC have hired us to work with them looking at the overlap between their enthusiastic entry into the world of social media (especially blogs) and their responsibility to be accountable to the people who pay their licence fee. This is getting us into some extremely interesting conversations with some brilliant people at the BBC, but the conversation has now also widened to address the public as well - scarily (and ironically given my earlier thoughts on the subject), I've just published a post to that end on the BBC Internet Blog from beyond the grave (or beyond the P45 at least).

Matthew

UK government launches open data initiative

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:17:28 -0800

Today sees the launch of the public beta of data.gov.uk. It's not often you can say the government has done something thoroughly enlightened of which you can feel proud, but today is one of those days. By all accounts the advocacy of Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been hugely important to making this happen - as a top-level persuader, agent of change inside the civil service and public mouthpiece. Maybe the government thought it would do them no harm in an election year to be associated with the star qualities of the web's inventor while he's basking in the afterglow last year's 20th anniversary. But who cares what the motivation is? This is good for lots of reasons:

The government is giving the public back the data that we have generated and paid for, or that the government has generated with our money. You'd think that was a no-brainer, but apparently we're a few steps ahead of the USA, who have much less of a tradition of government secrecy than we do.
They're actively and sincerely seeking creative collaboration from developers in generating apps and view which will help the public make sense of their data. Probably my favourite so far is Where Does My Money Go?, a dynamic infographic showing the growth of government spending and its distribution around different areas. It's a brilliantly executed example of data-driven graphical storytelling, and one which could genuinely help voters understand issues which are often clouded by rhetoric and politics.
The initiative not only opens up data but uses a number of open-source platforms to facilitate that, providing very welcome advocacy for their uptake.
data.gov.uk have created Crown Copyright to enshrine an open licence around the data, and one that's deliberately interoperable with Creative Commons 3.0, once again driving awareness and uptake of models for opening up IP.

Taken together, this should stimulate innovation around these data models, innovation in technology and better public engagement with the political questions that sit behind the data. Three cheers.
Matthew

The App Store Economy

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:53:11 -0800

Respect to the Om Malik's great GigaOm blog for this fabulous info graphic explaining the current economy of the Apple App Store. (via Gizmodo)
Simon

Goodbye again. Or is it?

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 14:14:51 -0800

I've left the BBC twice. The first time was in January 2000, the second in December 2009, ten years apart almost to the week and neatly bookending the noughties. How different the experience is the second time round speaks volumes for the way the world has changed in the intervening decade. Of course there are personal differences – I have ten years less hair, have acquired a family and am moving into a very different and exciting phase of my career as a director of Double Shot Consulting. But these aren't my concern here. What's truly striking is how very much more porous the BBC is a decade on.

The first time I left, my personal connection with the BBC was through some very good friends whose phone numbers and email addresses I kept in various forms of offline storage. My credentials with the BBC were available on request from the corporation, and archives of my personal achievements were spread between CDs, Zip disks (remember them?) and printouts. And that was it. Psychologically, it felt like leaving a continent on a steamer. Now, I remain bound to the BBC by the dozens of gossamer threads that form my personal corner of the Web. Broadly speaking, these break down into the areas of transparency and reputation.

Transparency first: Twitter keeps me up to date with everything from the minutiae of content publication, through conceptual discussion and office banter to the actual conduct of company business (we probably all know at least one person who's easier to reach via TweetDeck than Outlook or, perish the thought, a phone). The BBC has also embraced blogging in a big way, not simply, as many corporations do, announcing exciting product launches to its own advantage (though it does that too, and why not when you have as much to be proud of as the BBC?), but genuinely engaging in debate or exposing its inner workings in a way that’s often authentically personal and true to the medium. The BBC also boasts a small army of pretty brilliant personal bloggers who pursue their obsessions, share knowledge, air difficult questions, poke and prod at and generally hugely enhance the reputation of the BBC in the public space.

Weirdest are shared private web spaces like Basecamp or Google Docs where if I wanted to I could snoop morbidly on or even sabotage my former colleagues' activities. I share access to files from projects long since completed with many others who have also left their former jobs, as well as more up-to-date material. (This is because of the surprising paradox that those developing and using the web have failed to develop an instinct for the future, or at least for the present as the future past. In everything from the sharing of possibly confidential information to sewing our online identities, we and the tools we use consistently think too little and too late about how we will manage closure. I guess this reflects the preponderance of young people among developers and users of web tools, and it's also bound to change as the first web generation ages and penetration spreads – but I digress.)

However the digression has segued me nicely into my second theme, reputation. Have I really left the BBC? Can I really leave it? My smiling, woolly-hatted face still adorns a handful of BBC blog posts (oh, and these too). Leaving this kind of public trail is something that celebrities and public intellectuals have been used to for years, I suppose, but I’m certainly not the only ordinary citizen who’s occasionally brought up short by the unaccustomed permanence of the words and images we carry in our wake.

Slightly kinder and safer is the relationship we have with managed spaces like LinkedIn, where we can put our relationship with past employers on display to our own advantage. Facebook still has me pegged as belonging to the "British Broadcasting Corporation" network (which I don't ever remember joining). But conversely, in a social space we also rely on other people to remind us who we are and certify us to the world. Facebook won't let me join the Oxford University network because I never had an @oxford.ac.uk email address. So did I really go there? Again – issues of the cusp generation.

So why am I still obsessing over the BBC? Partly it's because leaving this time round is less like leaving on a steamer and more like an amicable divorce where the couple carries on living in the same house and using the same furniture. So it would be unnatural not to obsess over it. Also because the BBC is unusual and generally pretty exemplary in its embrace of transparency. But more importantly, the porosity of the BBC reflects a wider truth, that companies worldwide are lifting the veil, willingly or not, on their activities. We have blogging policemen, soldiers and civil servants too. Technology has hugely blurred the boundary between corporate and personal identity. How companies and organisations can harness this to their benefit and the benefit of the commons is going to be a pretty big question for some time to come.
Matthew

Music data in a right mess

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 05:00:32 -0800

I know it is Christmas and I should be thinking about gift for other people, but I couldn't help myself want to find out a bit more about a beautiful box set called 'How low can you go: Anthology of the string bass'.

So first port of call - Amazon.co.uk.

It's there - hooray. Crikey it's expensive - £53.98.

But look it's OK, Amazon has it as a download for £5.89. Sounds too good to be true (although I really want the box and the book, but never mind).

So I clicked away and got this.

Right then - it is too good to be true. What's this album then? Well it does have the word 'low' in the title but that is about the extent of the similarity. I checked a few other things I am fond of and the same thing happened - bad data links all over the place.

So what went wrong? Why has Amazon with its enviable data on everything messed this up? Is it because there are no unigue IDs pinning the service together? Is it because the blurriest of searches on a data set describing something as vast as music will nearly always get it wrong? It seems there is still a difficult road ahead to get this giant database stuff right and a lot for us to learn about what corners can still not be cut.
Justin

Douglas Rushkoff at Web 2.0 conference

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 04:32:42 -0800

This is well worth 15 minutes of your time: radical theorist-open source evangelist-graphic novelist Douglas Rushkoff discusses why the system of money which arose in the late middle ages is essentially broken for the Internet age. It's a pretty freewheeling rant and suffers for that occasionally (no musical innovation on the last 20 years? Er, hello?Meshuggah anyone, or Burial? And has he heard all the world's music in that time? Anyway, sore point.)

But for all that, it's good to hear a different commentary on Web 2.0 - an alternative to the Utopians and the professionally weary refuseniks.

Simon

MIT's "BIDI" screen

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:13:41 -0800

I won't even attempt to explain this... not least because I've barely grasped some of it meself... More bleeding edge tech from MIT, this time a "bidirectional" screen which can track the "viewer's" gestures and translate them into on-screen activity. Oh just watch it and you'll get it; it's pretty special.

Simon

Mind-blowing TED presentation from Pranav Mistry

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:30:27 -0800

DS is always interested in current technologies and their use in commercial and public life. But we also thrill at brilliant and thoroughly groundbreaking technology developments as this gives us an insight into what will be mainstream in the future.

So props to our friend Paul Schütze for pointing out this fabulous TED India talk by genius MIT-based inventor Pranav Mistry about his work in gesture-based, haptic computing and augmented reality. Can't really say much more than that, really. Just watch it, and marvel. The spontaneous standing ovation at the end of the talk speak volumes.

Simon

Another new team member!

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:22:32 -0800

Double Shot co-founder Sarah Turner will be working with us 2 days a week from November. The rest of the time she will continue as a digital media specialist with UK Trade and Investment (UKTI). Sarah's areas of expertise include R&D, technology collaboration, business development and consulting.

In her own words, "My UKTI clients are some of the biggest names globally in media and entertainment. I help their technologists and researchers address current and future challenges by helping them collaborate with the best UK innovators from both industry and academia. I plan to bring some of this emerging technology, from large and small companies, as well as international knowledge to Double Shot."
Sarah

Save the Children campaign: EVERY ONE

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:17:42 -0800

Somewhat of a belated post this. In September, Save the Children launched a ground-breaking campaign, EVERY ONE. A global campaign working across the STC alliance, the five year campaign is aimed at bringing about UN Millennium Development Goal 4: the reduction of child and infant mortality by 2/3 from 2000 to 2015.

We've been working with Save the Children all Summer, and helped them conceive and scope a (hopefully) critical component of the site: a website specifically aimed at addressing some of the thorny and challenging questions a the heart of such a campaign.

In the early stages of thinking about the project, we came to realise that while the central thrust of the campaign was surely unarguable, nonetheless serious questions do arise when considering it both on a personal level and within a global, practical political context. The key word there is questions. We decided that in order to grapple with the issues thrown up by difficult questions, we'd tackle 'em head on, building a website which begins by asking questions and compares the user's answers to those of others around the world.

Additionally, users can express their own views by adding them to a dynamic global map which will then tag them against their country of origin.

Over the coming months we'll be adding more questions to the site, releasing a very interesting facebook app and introducing a widget for bloggers. It's early days yet, and the site is going through a number of improvements right now, but our hope is that by the spring of next year something of a genuine global conversation will have been kicked off by the process and that child survival as a pressing issue has a greater visibility across the web.

Many thanks to our clients at Save the Children UK for their support of us in this project, and props to London-based agency Airlock for all their excellent work on the design, clever thinking and underlying technology.

Simon